


Karl's Adventures

by valerian_valentine



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Gen, Horror, Monsters, Outer Space, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-21 13:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30022494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valerian_valentine/pseuds/valerian_valentine
Summary: A collection of all the time travelling stories Karl wouldn't mind forgetting. Permanently.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Karl's Adventures

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so, i have no idea how karls time travel works and i have never seen a single episode of his whole series thing but i thoroughly enjoy horror and making ppl suffer for no reason, so, this whole thing is just going to be a compilation of Karl Jacobs getting spooked.

Being a time traveller, you come to pick up on things. Random things, things that cling to you like instinct. Like how some people subconsciously avoid going to the park they were bullied at as a child, avoid restaurants with a similar aesthetic as the one that gave you food poisoning, avoid places where lovers dumped you or left you disappointed, always being on edge around people who reminded you of someone horrible, someone you knew long, long ago with memories that fuzzed and blurred but left bad tastes in your mouth and soured your mood for the day. Well, time travelling brought up a lot of feelings like that. He shuddered when he saw big structures made of hard stone and no windows, frowned at red vines twisting and turning innocently around their environment, flushed when he heard a particular southern accent, and felt melancholy when holding simple music discs. However, he knew why he felt these things, the events that caused this. He wasn’t stupid, he knew how to keep his own damn diary up to date but what truly terrified him was the things he had no explanation for… Feelings with no apparent cause, sudden rushes of fear and adrenaline with no idea what he was supposed to be fearful of. This was simply the curse of being a time traveller.

* * *

Karl breathed deeply as the environment around him slowly formed and came into focus, trees and shrubbery surrounding him. As far as he could tell, there was only forest in this new time, thick branches covering up what little light was left out in this world. The ground below him crunched and cracked as he moved around in a circle to take in his surroundings, most of the plant life borderline kindling from how dry and dead it was, despite the air being warm and humid around him, air settling thickly on his skin like a damp towel taken out of the dryer too soon.

He took off his goggles to properly take in the sights, keeping an eye out for any hostile mobs but he couldn’t really see anything besides the occasional orange stream of sunlight. In fact, he couldn’t really hear anything either. No wind rustling, no birds chirping, nothing but his breathing, his heartbeat and the leaves crunching beneath his feet. It was startling, sure, being in such a sudden quiet but he took a breath to steady himself, pushing down the slowly rising feeling of fear. Humans always preached about how they needed some peace and quiet until they got it. Never really appreciated what they had until it was gone…

“The fuck?” He mumbled, looking around. He knew for a FACT he never would have thought of something that fucking pompous. Who the fuck was narrating this thing? A shittier Stephen King? He rolled his eyes at the thought and the weird, foreboding narration before he picked a random direction and started walking in it, as all good adventurers did. Sure, he probably should’ve found a way to mark where he started just in case but who cared? He didn’t need to know where he started anyway, besides, this place was new and fun! Maybe he could find some big, abandoned structure or dig up some long forgotten mystery!

He walked through the forest, humming a quiet tune to himself to keep himself company in the silent forest. The thing about most fear was the tension. Tension before breaking silence, tension before something jumped out to hurt you, tension before something horrible happened, so, if he just kept being the first one to break the tension, there was no way he’d get startled! Can’t be startled by sudden noise if you’re the one making all the noise. The vague thought of something hearing him and deciding they didn’t exactly like him crossed his mind but he just ignored it. No fear here! It’s just an empty forest, there wasn’t anything horrible about it. He was just being a paranoid little shit, he’d be fine.

The sun was setting fast, however, and it was getting harder and harder to see and he silently hoped there would be anything but a new moon tonight. He forgot to pack torches, something he knew he’d come to regret within the next twenty minutes and he needed some sort of light. Otherwise, he’d be completely blind in a silent forest, nothing but himself there to comfort him… The idea made his skin crawl and his brain recoil. Best not to think about it, lest he get riled up and panicked before the night even came. There was no use in dreading the possible future events when he had the here and now to worry about.

The forest was.. Well, empty. Nothing really remarkable about it. No clearings, no slightly bigger trees, no rocks or boulders, just… Trees. As far as the eye could see. There were inclines and declines, areas with slightly fewers trees, a few bundles of bushes but none of those things had anything unique about them, something that put them apart from all the other areas with slightly fewer trees and bundles of bushes. It was all monotonous. Same thing, same theme over and over and over again. Trees, trees and more trees. Not even trees that stretched on forever and created thick blockages he had to shove his way though, just normal trees with a thick canopy above him that didn’t emit a sound as he hiked his way through the area. No creaking, no crunching, no whooshing.. Nothing besides the thick humid air snuffling any hope of a nice, cool breeze. It was… Suffocating and exposing. There was nowhere to hide, no cramped spaces but the air around him was stiff and stagnant, making him feel limited. It was confusing and his body didn’t know whether to curl up to hide or started desperately digging for a way out of this suffocating place.

He saw a hill nearby and jogged over, hoping for a touch of high ground so he could take in his surroundings a bit better and started climbing, using exposed roots as foot holders and tree trunks as rails to grab when his ankles trembled for no other reason than to make him squeal. The hill wasn’t some treacherous mountain or a steep cliff, just a hill. Not a smooth, slow and gradual incline but just a mound of dirt in the middle of the silent forest that offered up a bit of better viewing.

He stumbled onto the top, a small smile on his face as he pushed himself off the tree trunk, stumbling onto the finally semi flat surface covered in, well, more dead plants. It was stupid and he could have twisted an ankle or chosen a much better route but the roots looked like stairs and, well, you would have done the exact same thing.

He looked around, hoping to see something from his heightened view but found nothing that he hadn’t already seen. Dead plant matter as far as the eye could see which wasn’t that far now. Shadows surrounded him, things only a few feet away now shrouded in a darkness his weak eyes couldn’t see through. The brightest moments of the day left before he could even use them, leaving him in a suffocating darkness that threatened to swallow him whole, surrounding him until it was all he knew.

He looked up, hoping to see the moon despite knowing it wouldn’t be there and felt relief rush through his system when he saw the sky. Bright, beautiful stars shone above him, twinkling and multiplying as the sun slowly set. There didn’t seem to be any light pollution around here, as far as he could tell, so he settled on staying for a while, just wanting to observe and watch the sky. Enjoy it for a while. Relax.

He brought out his notebook and a pencil, sitting down next to a tree and leaned against the stump, the plants crunching around him. He brought his notebook up to his face, having to stare at the pages wide eyed just to see the outlines of words, more and more words as he flipped through the pages until he finally found a blank one and started writing, documenting the world so far. He wrote down the emptiness of it all, the desolate land, the dry ground beneath him and the thick blanket of air around him. He tried to document all of it, tried to write down as many details as he could but the darkness drew closer and closer, closing around him and erasing his writing until all he could really see was a piece of paper with a few shapes on it. He sighed in defeat and put away his journal and pencil, finally taking a look around. The only thing he could see was the occasional ray of moonlight but that was about it, almost everything being shrouded with a heavy layer of darkness that seemed… Darker than what he was used to. He’s been in caves with zero light shining through, he’s been in the middle of nowhere in the night but he’s never seen a darkness like this before. It looked like it had a feeling to it, like he could stick his hand out and  _ touch it. _

He looked up to avoid thinking about the dark around him, smiling when the beautiful sky greeted him. Of course, he couldn’t see thousands upon thousands of stars and beautiful blues and purples, that was just unrealistic, a thing only visible in heavily edited photos. Instead, he saw the pitch black sky with clusters of beautiful stars and a small line across it, looking like a small, thin cloud. The milky way. 

There was something elegant and entrancing about this situation. He could do without the complete and utter silence though, the deafening silence making his head kinda hurt from all the straining he was doing to hear a sound, any sound around him. The stars twinkled and shone, seemingly winking at him as he watched them slowly move through the sky. It was beautiful. The void of the sky sucked him in, distracting him from real life with it’s simple yet complex look. He loved it. Maybe he’d take…

Who would he take?

He frowned at the lost thought. Who would he take here? Who would sit with him and watch the sky, become consumed by the void with him? He didn’t know. He tried to think of someone but his mind was drawing up blanks and the sky seemed to consume any whole thought he had, muddling all thought processes. It was startling, how deep and vast the void of the sky was… How it stretched on forever, constantly consumed by darkness. A familiar feeling started settling in his stomach as he watched the sky, growing and gnawing at him, overwhelming him quickly as dizziness took over him and his heart stopped and he felt wind start rushing past him like he was falling into the abyss above him, nothing to keep him tethered to the ground. He felt like he was free falling through the sky itself, gravity switching and twisting his body as his vision blurred and tunneled in on the complete and utter beauty above him, the sky growing closer and closer and closer-

He ripped his gaze away from the sky with a gasp and held his hands out to catch himself, body trembling with unsteadiness despite sitting on the perfectly still hill. His whole body felt light and disoriented, head swimming as he tried to regain himself and his ‘footing’. He dug his fingers into the dry dirt below him to keep him tethered, almost weeping when the humid air settled around him once again, the once suffocating feeling now reassuring. A silent promise not to let him fall into the darkness above.

He had no idea how long he had been staring at the sky but it must’ve been a few hours, the moon now shining brightly above him, providing a little bit of light to see by. The forest around him felt.. Different, like something had changed but as he looked around, he couldn’t see anything out of place. No identifying landmarks, no sudden trees where there hadn’t been trees before but to be honest, he wouldn’t really know the difference. The forest looked the exact same to him, everything blending into one big, monotonous background. You know the backgrounds of painting, of forests so inline and almost soldier like? A certain robotic nature of it all, unchanging and repetitive. It felt like he was trapped there, in the background of some artist's creation. Blurry and made with frustration, desperation for it to  _ look right _ , layers and layers of thick paint unevenly coating each other to cover up the ‘mistakes’. Maybe he really was trapped in a painting this time..

But the tree behind him was real, the dirt under his hands was real, the sky above him was… Let's just not discuss the sky above him. The temptation to stare up at it again was great but he knew better than to let something like that get ahold of him.

He shakily rose to his feet, gripping the tree to steady himself. He was still a bit wobbly, his brain still thinking the body was on the edge of a cliff or free falling so when he first saw the neon strand of yellow, he didn’t think much of it, chalked it up to a hallucination or a trick of his eyes until he was finally steadied and saw it again. In the distance, a small, still cloth shone under the moonlight, nearly casting light itself from how reflective it was. He took a moment to stare at it before he started making his way towards it.

Yeah, stupid idea, but he was curious and didn’t want to just leave this place without finding  _ something _ interesting!

It took a hot second but he finally got his confidence back, feet stomping confidently through the dried leaves rather than shakily stumbling around like a newborn deer. He kept his eye on the cloth, watching as it slowly grew closer and closer, not moving an inch from its spot. It looked like a hikers mark, a little brightly colored cloth tied to a tree so hikers could find their way back.

Or others could recover their bodies easier.

The idea of a body waiting for him near this sent a shiver down his spine but he surely would have heard something, right? Or felt something? His weird psychic human senses would have kicked in and told him  _ something _ was wrong and he needed to go or maybe told him he wasn’t as alone as he thought. Right? That’s how that worked, right? He’s read hundreds of stories of people narrowly missing death due to their trusty gut instincts, surely that would have happened to him… Right?

He reached the cloth after a couple of minutes, anxiety stirring in his gut. He mentally flipped a coin in his head before touching the cloth, hoping to god it wasn’t haunted and got a bit disappointed there was no climactic ending or shouting or… Well, anything. He looked around, expecting a skull or something to pop up out of nowhere or maybe something would come running up to him and he’d have to fight for his life but there was just… Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just a bright cloth on a tree. He was tempted to look up to see if there was anything up in the tree but decided against it, not wanting to test fate again by staring up into space.

He looked around the horizon and nearly jumped when he saw another brightly colored cloth just.. Sitting there in the distance, almost glowing under the moonlight.

He felt like prey being lured into a trap but he was far from the smartest man in the shed so he started walking towards the marker. It was a good couple of feet away, barely there unless you were looking for it and once you knew what you were looking for, it was hard not to see it. The ground crunched and crumbled underneath him, the dry dirt cracking easily under his weight, the leaves getting reduced to powder under his shoes. The vague thought of where all the humidity was coming from crossed his mind. I mean, all the plants were dried up, the ground was dry, there weren’t any clouds so.. Where was it coming from?

But, he had more things to worry about than the weather and why it was behaving this way. He knew better than to follow a very clearly marked trail all alone in a place he had no knowledge of besides the basics but something inside of him demanded satisfaction. There  _ had _ to be something here, something that was worth all of the build up and anxiety. A monster that completely destroyed the land or maybe a ghost that banished those in it’s forest or maybe the sky snatched everything up, anything! He’d even settle for a brutal murder at this point! Anything to show his anxiety was justified!

He reached the marker with as little fanfare as before and looked around yet again. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.. There was a small little area of pebbles but that was hardly something worth all of this. He started looking around for the next trail marker, getting a bit pissed off now. There  _ had _ to be something here! A bone or maybe a shoe, anything! Bugs, thriving shrubbery, a patch of fucking grass, maybe a can, literally anything to show that  _ something _ was here! He twirled around, moving in circles around the marker, searching for the next one and it took maybe ten minutes before he spotted it. It must have had some.. Blood on it or something to dull it’s reflection but it was there, much farther away than the others.

As he started almost racing towards the cloth, he started coming up with possible stories. Maybe there was a wounded hiking group going through here and they were rapidly running out of cloth to guide them so they had to use it sparingly while also using it to patch up wounds from some unknown monster, something huge and horrendous and fuzzy. Blood would trickle down the leaders leg as they desperately limped along, the group crying and almost sobbing for help as they tried to escape, tried to find a proper place to hide and camp for the night and  _ this _ was their last cloth, this was their last marker, their last hope and he would find their skeletons laying on the ground below it, tragedy surrounding the bones or-or maybe he would find their campsite or a wallet with a picture of the group in it! Of course! That’s how stories went, that’s how adventures went, he was  _ going _ to find something!! He was sure of it!

He nearly crashed into the tree, not even noticing how fast he was running at that point. He started desperately looking around, trying to spot the groups campsite and felt his heart slowly sink as nothingness surrounded him. The same exact trees and dead plants as before, not a single patch of greenery nearby besides the leaves above him. Even the cloth was plain, just dirt covering it up a bit. Maybe.. Maybe this was an apocalypse..? The trees were settled on top of once great cities that were taken down by.. By…

He groaned and leaned against the marked tree, glaring at the ground below him. There had to be something here and he was starting to get sick and tired of the nothingness. Like, he got it! There was nothing here! But.. But there had to be a story. A reason why there was nothing there, an explanation. Maybe a tablet or a campsite or at least a monster to hunt him down!

He sighed and looked around, flinching when there was a sudden stinging in his eye. Right. Being in a humid environment meant sweating a lot. He rubbed it away, new tears streaming out of his left eye to flush out the salty sweat and he silently hoped the blurred vision would give him some new, amazing look that would reveal why the world was the way it was. Maybe he could see some spelling in the trees or maybe a pattern or a symbol or  _ something _ but no, just.. A hurting eye. He debated going back home but he needed to try one last time.

He looked around for the familiar glow of cloth, feeling his skin itch and his brain start sounding off alarms. He got the distinct feeling of being watched but that was impossible, there was nothing around him and nothing was making noise so he chalked it up to his brain making things up for the sake of a good story. There was nothing, no bright reflective cloth dangling from any trees, no… Well, you get the point. The exact same thing over and over again, blah blah blah, painting, suffocating feeling, darkness, fuzzy creature following him, strange sky, humid air, dead plan-...

**_Fuzzy creature following him?_ **

In his panic, he opened up a time portal and fucking  _ fled _ before he could even take in the surroundings more. The sound of rapidly crunching leaves and thumping steps soon faded from his hearing as he spiraled through time, his heart pounding in his chest. He had no idea it was even there, he probably didn’t realize it was even there over the sound of his own heartbeat and he didn’t even know what it fucking looked like besides the fact it was huge, fuzzy and not fucking happy.

He spent the next few days avoiding large cattle and the woods, even after the experience faded from memory. He didn’t even know why but he always felt watched when surrounded by trees and humid air… Probably just his imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr is valerian-valentine-2 so please support me there as well and feel free to comment some of your fears or nightmares so i can possibly incorporate them into the next adventure :)


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